The US is Israel’s only source for vital military hardware (aid
dollars are not as important as availability of spare parts and
qualitatively superior technology), and its only defender in the
UN Security Council. I think it’s safe to say that Israel’s
enemies would eat it alive if the US turned against it. American
Jews are only a tiny portion (a couple of percent) of the US
population, but enormously important in determining policy toward
Israel.

This is because they take an interest in it, because non-Jewish
politicians look toward Jews for direction in this area, and
because Jewish opinion provides an excuse to justify what
officials want to do anyway. So if the administration wants to
stop Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem, it is very helpful
if it can point to a large group of American Jews that agrees with
it. And this is why Beinartism is dangerous.

Beinartism often expresses itself in statements that begin by
declaring undying love for Israel, but then continue by
excoriating it in ways usually associated with the extreme
anti-Zionist Left. Beinartism, like J Street, is phony: it is dislike (or worse)
pretending to be love, and it includes a threat that if Israel
doesn’t change in accordance with Beinartist principles, it will
be abandoned by American Jewry.

Yaakov Lozowick, discussing speakers at the
J Street conference — including Beinart himself, but also David
Saperstein of the Union for Reform Judaism — put it this way:

…there’s a consistent tone of disdain of Israeli society coming
from these people which I find arrogant and very distasteful.
Americans left and right have lost their civility in political
discourse; Israelis, admittedly, never had it. Yet there are
codes in language, deeper than mere words, and the subtext of
these J Street spokesmen when discussing Jews from Russia,
religious Jews and centrist Jews, is ugly. I find no other word
for it. Just as their compassion for Israel’s Arabs (the
citizens) is odd. There’s a level of identification with them
which is totally lacking when they talk about the majority of
the Israeli Jews. I say this as someone who wishes only the best
for Israel’s Arabs.

Beinartism is characterized by false analogies: the situation of
Israeli Arab citizens, or even Arabs in the territories, is often
compared to that of African-Americans in the pre-civil rights
movement South. It fails to note the huge differences, and the
ways in which the physical situation of Israel makes it vulnerable
in a way that we’ve never been.

Beinartism advocates a two-state solution to the conflict with
the Palestinian Arabs, but it ignores the real security issues
that would have to be dealt with before such a solution would be
anything other than suicide. It makes vast assumptions about Arab
intentions, or rather, doesn’t even think about them.

Beinartism accepts uncritically the prejudices of the academic
and media elite of Israel, who tend to despise Russian immigrants,
Jews from Arab countries, observant Jews and of course (last but
not least) ‘settlers’.

It also gives great importance to issues that barely move the
needle in Israel, like the Women of the Wall or the struggle for
recognition of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism in Israel (the
degree of influence of ultra-Orthodoxy and the Rabbinate on
society are a concern to many Israelis, but the great majority
simply don’t see the point of Reform or Conservative Judaism).

The new president of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), Rabbi
Richard Jacobs, is a Beinartist — indeed he quotes the
manifesto with approval in a sermon to his Scarsdale NY congregation.
And today, the URJ emailed to subscribers of its “Ten Minutes of
Torah” service, a copy of a
recent Forward article by J. J. Goldberg about why “the
Zionist Organization of America and various far-right bloggers”
are wrong in being upset about Jacobs’ appointment.

Jacobs is no more hostile to Israel than Shimon Peres, or David
Ben-Gurion for that matter. Like Ben-Gurion he supports
partition of the Land of Israel into two states.

Peres and Ben-Gurion may have favored a two-state solution
(Peres, alive, still favors it), even thought it was essential.
But unlike J Street and the Beinartists, neither of the above
would agree to a deal without appropriate security guarantees. Nor
would they urge the US to vote to condemn Israel in the Security
Council, as J Street did.

The problem according to Goldberg is not that Jacobs is active in
organizations that are, despite what they say, anti-Israel. Nor
that he participated in an anti-Israel demonstration in Jerusalem.
No, rather it’s that Israel is out of step, not Jacobs:

The problem is that while Jacobs’s views on Israel are quite
mainstream among American Jews, the notion that such views
endanger Israel and have no place in Jewish communal discourse
is becoming mainstream in Israel. In other words, we have a very
serious family feud brewing.

I’m not sure where the “no place in Jewish communal discourse”
came in. Similar views are expressed daily in the pages of
Ha’aretz. But do they endanger Israel? You bet they do.
And having an exponent of them lead the largest denomination of
American Jews is a bad idea.

Where is the American Jewish mainstream today? You might start
your search with the simple fact that the largest Jewish
religious movement chose Jacobs to lead it. But then consider
this: J Street was founded just three years ago and is already
one of the biggest organizations on the American Jewish scene,
even before it’s out of diapers. Consider, too, the rapid growth
of Jewish activism to the left of J Street, among the boycott,
divestment and sanctions crowd and Palestinian-solidarity types.
What used to be the left is now closer to the center.

First of all, nobody asked me, a member of a Reform congregation,
whether I wanted Rabbi Jacobs. And nobody asked the president of
the congregation, either. I do not have details about the process
by which the URJ nominated and elected Rabbi Jacobs, but I’m sure
that — like most organizational decisions — democracy had little
to do with it.

Third, the fact that the extreme anti-Zionist Left is busy
demonizing and delegitimizing Israel does not imply that a
somewhat less aggressive — but still anti-Israel — position is
‘mainstream’. Although the tactic of claiming to be ‘pro-Israel’
and ‘liberal’ may have fooled some people, lobbying against
sanctions on Iran and for condemnation of Israel in the Security
Council — as J Street has done — is not ‘mainstream’.

Goldberg also falls back on the ultimate recourse of the
‘progressive’ without an argument — he calls his opponents crazy
right-wingers:

Also telling is the fact that the objections to Jacobs’s
nomination come from a narrow spectrum on the right. Being
identified with the New Israel Fund and J Street just isn’t
remarkable in American Jewish life anymore. Attacking them is
increasingly a sign of eccentricity.

J Street and similar groups are not mainstream. But the question
is more of appearance than reality, because their power grows in
proportion to how important they can make themselves appear. J
Street, for example, received half of its funding in 2008-9 from
a mysterious source in Hong Kong, not to mention a large
contribution from the anti-Israel George Soros. Grass roots? Not
hardly. But if they can convince members of Congress that they
are, they become dangerous.

J Street, NIF, Beinartism and now Rabbi Jacobs represent a
concerted push to change American Jewry from a source of support
for Israel into yet another weapon against it.